Brian Moore

By using his successive countries of residence as settings for his novels, Brian Moore has set critics the problem of assigning him a literary nationality. Despite this difficulty, he can perhaps be claimed with least argument as one of the best novelists Ulster has produced.

His first novel, Judith Hearne [Add To Basket] (1955), has been hailed as a minor masterpiece in its incisive portrayal of a pathetic Belfast spinster. The Feast of Lupercal [Add To Basket] (1957) attempts less successfully the similar theme of a social failure ironically regarded by the community as a threat to its puritanical, Irish-Catholic virtues. Moore's partly comic bildungsroman, The Emperor of Ice-Cream [Add To Basket] (1965), recreated Belfast during the World War II German "Blitz," whose effects precipitate the hero into manhood. An Answer from Limbo [Add To Basket] is the author's very fine kunstlerroman, whose central figure has been strong enough to escape Ulster's provincialism, philistinism, and sectarianism only to discover in America the perplexing moral problems of his craft. In these four novels the city of Belfast is evocatively drawn.

Since The Luck of Ginger Coffey [Add To Basket] (1960), his third novel and a work of comic pathos that follows the harrowing adventures in Canada of an Irish immigrant, Moore's fiction has become more cosmopolitan. Subsequent novels have mirrored, with the expected refractions and reversions, the author's own movements. Born in Belfast on August 25, 1921, into a Catholic family that had recently converted from Protestantism, Moore left Northern Ireland twenty-two years later when he joins the British Ministry of War Transport during World War II and was stationed briefly in North Africa, Italy and France. In 1948, he emigrated to Canada and there took out citizenship. He spent several years as a journalist and struggling fiction writer in Montreal, the setting for Ginger Coffey. Following the publication of this novel, the Canadian writer and critic Jack Ludwig wrote an article entitled: "Brian Moore: Ireland's Loss, Canada's Novelist." Moore was regarded for a few years as Canada's most promising writer and in 1960 received the Governor General of Canada's Award for Fiction. In 1959, the author moved to the United States, first to Long Island and then to New York City, the setting for An Answer from Limbo [Add To Basket] , which is in part an energetic, bitter portrait of that city's literary and bohemian scene. Later he moved to Malibu, California, which provided him with the motive and material for Fergus [Add To Basket] (1970), a novel that is an equally bitter portrait of Hollywood's literary side-industry in which Moore has been involved, writing motion-picture scripts. On the strength of such novels, Moore has been acclaimed a prominent United States writer.

Through a tyrannising memory stirred by guilt, remorse, or depression, Moore's Irish-born Americans vainly try to exorcise the Ireland they thought they had left behind. Moreover, their solution to an Irish problem itself becomes merely a new American problem and a new theme: thus, the escape from provincialism leads to the dreadful freedom of the cosmopolis, and the escape from religion becomes the new problem of faithlessness. For Moore America is Ireland's probable future, but in the provocative and fable-like Catholics [Add To Basket] (1972), a late twentieth-century Ireland becomes the hideously bureaucratic and faithless future of both. And when there is no continuity of theme and crisis between Ireland and America, Moore senses analogies. The sectarianism of Ulster, no doubt as well as his knowledge of Quebec, supply him with the idea and necessary insights for a book on the Quebec separatist kidnapping and murder of a cabinet minister. This work, The Revolution Script [Out of Print] (1972), has been called documentary fiction in the manner of Norman Mailer.

The realistic surfaces of Moore's novels derive as much from English and American as from Irish models, but there is a preoccupation with ritual in the novels that may be attuned to the primitive echoes of Irish society. From his fellow-countryman, James Joyce, Moore has learned the technique of internalising at length about his characters' thoughts and feelings. His most psychologically revealing successes with it are his vivid portraits of women under sexual stress: the titular heroines of Judith Hearne, I Am Mary Dunne [Add To Basket] (1968), and The Doctor's Wife [Add To Basket] (1976). Moore has a seductive storytelling ability, great honesty, and profound sympathetic identification with his heroines. He is unwilling, however, to explore the complexity of ethical and theological issues in addition to dramatising their psychological causes and effects. A certain flatness of diction and a marked thinning of fictional texture developed after I Am Mary Dunne. That novel, alongside Judith Hearne [Add To Basket] and An Answer from Limbo [Add To Basket] , represent Moore's finest writing.

(John Wilson Foster)

Moore's novels have continued to appear regularly at two-or-three-year intervals and have continued to sell well because of their crafted plots, brisk pacing, and lucidly readable style. To critics, however, they have seemed something of a disappointment after the superb characters, such as Judith Hearne and Ginger Coffey, of the first books and also after the finely evoked backgrounds of Belfast, Montreal, and New York, which were drawn from personal experience. Up to I Am Mary Dunne [Add To Basket] of 1968, one Moore novel had a comfortable similarity to another. His recent books, however, have been disconcertingly various in genre, and one does not really know what to expect from the next Moore book except that it will probably differ considerably from the previous one. Although it might seem that the recent work depends on idea and imagination because the vein of memory and personal experience has dried up, it might more plausibly seem that the recent books, so seemingly disparate, have the underlying similarity of tracing and investigating contradictory and clashing moralities.

The Mangan Inheritance [Add To Basket] (1979) is about James Mangan, a sometime poet whose wife, a well-known actress, leaves him and is shortly killed with her lover in a car crash. Mangan has been struck by his remarkable resemblance to a daguerrotype of the poet James Clarence Mangan and journeys to an Irish village to investigate a possible family connection. He discovers two previous Mangan poets, the later one still living, with his face and with a ghastly personal story to tell. The characters are excellently drawn, the prose very readable, and the plot well-structured, but what it all means is another matter. The production of poetry is itself a kind of morality, but the various Mangan poetes maudites live selfish, even appallingly selfish, lives; and the hero at the end seems to opt for humane responsibility rather than for art.

Cold Heaven [Add To Basket] (1983) appears initially a sort of spooky thriller about the heroine's husband, who has been pronounced dead after a boating accident in France but who disappears from the hospital morgue and returns to America, where he has physical relapses into death and near-death. The real story, however, concerns the wife, a Catholic-educated atheist who has for a year refused to announce an apparition of the Blessed Virgin who wants a shrine on a rock off the Californian coast. The plight of the husband appears as a divine attempt to put pressure on the wife, but eventually God lets the heroine off the hook by having a nun see the apparition also. This allows the wife to leave her husband for her lover and to live more happily ever after. This seems an outlandish and even silly framework of plot, but it is well told and has some excellent minor characters. Why Moore devised it would seem, possibly, an attempt to continue his investigation of moral action, which is the crux of his recent books and which is distinctly an antidote to the moral simplicities of most fiction.

Black Robe [Add To Basket] (1985) is an account of a canoe journey from Quebec by a Jesuit missionary accompanied by a band of Algonquin Indians in the seventeenth century. The book is the most violent and harrowing of Moore's works and is full of murder, rape, cannibalism, and the grisliest depiction of torture. The primitive life with its hazards, hardships, and ferocious sufferings in graphically caught, and Moore is particularly successful in his evocation of the Indian character. In part, he accomplishes this by devising a language for them both simple and pervasively profane. His underlying message seems to be the depiction "of the strange and gripping tragedy that occurred when the Indian belief in a world of night and in the power of dreams clashed with the Jesuits' preachments of Christianity and a paradise after death."

The Colour of Blood [Add To Basket] (1987) is partly a John Buchanish thriller with lots of exciting chases. However, it is also a late cold war thriller with, as its intriguing hero, the Roman Catholic cardinal of a country in the Eastern bloc. Even more interesting is that the opposition is not between communist bad guys and Western good guys. The cardinal is attempting to avert a great public demonstration against the puppet government, a demonstration being incited by patriots and even patriotic elements among his own clergy. Seeing little reason to look to the West for help, the cardinal fears that antigovernment protests will cause violence, deaths and a much more repressive regime for his country than that now in power. Changing world events have, to an extent, dated the political background, but the book remains a thoroughly taut and thoughtful read that seems to suggest that the best moral view is pragmatic. Perhaps the one drawback of this short book is that most of its many characters are a bit thinly drawn.

Lies of Silence [Add To Basket] (1990) is about the Northern Troubles and set in contemporary Belfast and London. The protagonist is Michael Dillon, a hotel manager who is planning to leave his wife. Before he can tell her, their home is invaded by marked Irish Republican Army (IRA) men who plan to keep his wife hostage while he delivers a bomb to his hotel. Accidentally , Dillon sees one of the faces and, to avert the massacre of many people, seizes an opportunity to alert the police to the bomb. His subsequent and well-dramatised problem is whether to opt for safety and refuse to identify the IRA man and live a contented life in England with his mistress, whom he loves, in a job that he likes. Much pressure is put on him by his mistress, his wife, and a priest who is an uncle of the IRA man to remain silent. After several times refusing, he at length decides not to testify, but it is too late, and the IRA burst into his London flat to kill him. This is a tautly plotted novel, full of incident. More important, it poses, as many Irish novels do not, a moral choice that is not clear.

So also does No Other Life [Add To Basket] (1993), which is laid in a Caribbean country much like Haiti, and its action parallels recent political developments there. More important, it is an excellently, even excitingly dramatised story of the clash of morality with, or possibly the perversion of morality by, politics. The story details the rise of a brilliant and even saintly young black priest who comes to political power on a swell of popular anger against the years-long social and economic repression of the people by wealth businessmen and the army. It is a story of how goodness does not merely temporise with expediency but even verges itself into tyranny and possibly finally does more harm than good.

That Moore seems attempting in his recent work is the concoction of fables investigating the complex vagaries of morality, rather than the traditional black and white simplicities of fiction. He has grown from a depicter of individual tragedies into a provocative novelist of ideas. The ideas are much more unsettling than the straightforward simplicities of 1930s social novelists like Dos Passos or Steinbeck. Nor is he to be really compared with the more complicated artistic polemicist such as Shaw, for in Moore the moral view is distinctly and most un-Shavianly not clear-cut. In actuality, his recent work can hardly be regarded as a falling-off, but rather as an exciting advance into litter-charted territory.

(from Dictionary of Irish Literature edited by Robert Hogan, published by Greenwood Press)

Moore's most recent novel, The Magician's Wife [Add To Basket] (1997) is a mesmerising story set in the late 1850s in France and Algeria. It blends political intrigue, moral enquiry and the unforgettable portrait of a lady. Emmeline Lambert is married to an illusionist sent by Napoleon III to persuade the Arabs - posed for a holy war and in thrall to charismatic leaders - that France's might and magic are greater . Emmeline begins to feel like an illusionist herself, when she dazzles the Emperor and then sheds her inhibitions along with flimsy notions of patriotism and propriety in the hot glare of the Algerian sun.